Dear user,

this set of two CD-ROMs might become a starting point for you to discover the world of the www as the huge resource for biological and biochemical teaching material it is. The world wide web not only offers the possibility to keep yourself informed about approaches colleagues choose to teach the same topics as you do, it makes it also possible to use these materials for your own teaching, to stimulate your work, and to talk to the authors of interesting web-projects via e-mail. What is more, this opportunity is not even limited to the United States of America. You can virtually contact the teaching and research community of whole world and use their sometimes extraordinarily good web-materials for your classes. We have found a large number of fascinating web-projects, many of which you will find in our 'Virtual Library - Teaching Botany and related Topics' on this CD-ROM.

In addition, we collected follow-up material in the months after the first PKAL Summer Institute. Our intention was to provide you with a lasting, if only partial, documentation of the Summer Institute and its feedback. Our special acknowledgement is due to all the authors who allowed us to present their web-projects here. We once again owe a debt to Jeanne Narum and Susan Singer from Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) who gave us the opportunity to introduce our work at the PKAL 2000 Summer Institute and who agreed to distribute this CD-ROM. It was a pleasure to have such an interested audience for our work. Thanks to all the attendees who supported us by sending their follow-up material. You will find it when opening the welcome.htm document. Moreover, the CD is a very practical example of how material can be documented with rather few means and even fewer people. Only moderate know-how and limited costs are necessary. Hopefully, it will stimulate some of our users to try becoming web-authors themselves.

Feedback will be very welcome. Just send it to b-online@botanik.uni-hamburg.de or to alice.bergfeld@berlin.de.

Like all our previous CD-ROMs, this one, too, is strictly non-commercial. It is given to the attendees of the Summer Institute, to the authors of the presented web-projects, and to the biology faculty members and students of a few African Universities only.

And now: please enjoy a look at our CD-ROMs !

Alice Bergfeld
Peter von Sengbusch

November 2000

Botany online - The Internet Hypertextbook
http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/

Alice Bergfeld
E-mail: alice.bergfeld@berlin.de

Prof. Dr. Peter v. Sengbusch
Ohnhorststr. 18
D-22609 Hamburg
Institut fuer Allgemeine Botanik
Universitaet Hamburg
E-mail: b-online@botanik.uni-hamburg.de